PSA: Your Claude shared chats and Artifacts may have ended up on Google - TechCrunch

What the report says

TechCrunch reported that an unknown number of shared Claude conversations and Artifacts became searchable through Google over the weekend, after Reddit users found that searches using operators such as Claude’s share-link path could reveal public pages. The material reportedly included some highly sensitive content, with other outlets cited by TechCrunch saying examples included medical information, internal company documents, children’s names and phone numbers, employee reviews and work notes.

The exposure appears tied to Claude’s sharing feature, which lets users generate a URL for a chat, app-like Artifact or document that can be viewed by anyone who has the link. TechCrunch noted that Claude’s interface says anyone with the link can view the shared item, but said the wording may lead users to think the link is intended for limited sharing rather than broad indexing on the open web.

Anthropic told TechCrunch that shared links are not provided to search engines through directories or sitemaps and are not guessable, adding that they can appear in search if users post them somewhere public, such as a forum or social network. Google told TechCrunch that search engines do not decide which web pages are public, and that site owners have tools to control crawling and indexing.

TechCrunch said its own Monday afternoon test no longer returned the results described by Reddit users, suggesting the issue had been addressed in some way. The report also noted similar past incidents involving Claude and ChatGPT shared conversations being indexed or scraped. Users who want to review Claude public links can check Settings, then Privacy, then Shared Chats.